The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na•ve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father’s wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and armed with a mysterious document that he believes gives him power over others. This new English version by the most acclaimed of Dostoevsky’s translators is a masterpiece of pathos and high comedy.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

“The Adolescent is the most captivating of Dostoevsky’s novels.” —Konstantin Mochulsky, author of Dostoevsky: His Life and Work

Praise for previous Dostoevsky translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
The Brothers Karamazov:
“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoeveky’s original.” —The New York Times Book Review
Crime and Punishment:
"The best [translation] currently available . . . an especially faithful recreation . . . with a coiled-spring kinetic energy. . . . Don't miss it." —The Washington Post Book World
Demons:
“A capital job of restoration." --Los Angeles Times

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

About the Translators:

Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture.

Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian. Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Anton Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

They were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of The Brothers Karamazov, and more recently Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page